What is A/B Testing and Why is it Important?

A very common perception among businesses, about a successful e-commerce website is that it’s all about getting the sales done and having an amazing customer conversion rate. And that’s all any e-commerce business will wish for.

So, you might be getting an impression that it’s all about luring customers onto your website and then they will automatically proceed through the conversion funnel and leave your site by completing their sales journey precisely the way you wanted them to do.

It’s not that easy but we have good news for you. All this is possible and attainable only if your website is designed primarily for your customer’s convenience. How that can be achieved?

Making the process of products selection, purchase quick and easy for them.

Easy navigation and classification of the products.

Easy payment options and quick checkout process.

Live up to your customer’s expectations and deliver what you promise.

But now the real question is how you’re going to determine what customer’s expectations are from your website? What do they like? What’s causing trouble to them? So, how will you do that? Don’t worry A/B testing is something on which you can rely upon.

You should always remember that the focus is always on them and your e-commerce website should always be offering the quickest solutions to all the pain points of your customers. And it’s never easy to read your customer’s mind. So, test, test, and test. See what brings better results and apply that, it’s as simple as that and it will be going to be an ongoing process.

Some amazing examples of the successful e-commerce websites with a broad and loyal customer base are Amazon and Netflix.

If we look at how Amazon has gained their customers’ loyalty and trust so much so that they’re even signing up for Amazon key service, letting a delivery person drop your order by opening your front door, in your absence. Trustworthiness is the key. All this is attained by living up to their customers’ expectations.

With so many options available in the market, your website should aim for gaining customer loyalty by giving them a proper reason to visit your site again.

What is A/B testing?

It’s quite a familiar term and is very widely used. But in case you want to understand the very basics of A/B testing that is also commonly known as split testing. Here it is, all the necessary information provided in this article to help you understand it easily.

You compare two versions of whatever change you intend to make on your webpage, namely A and B, and test the responses and performance of both. Whatever version leads to improved conversions, is the one you will continue with, It’s as simple as that.

In plain simple words, it gives you an accurate picture of what’s working and what’s not. All this leads to better decision making and results-oriented changes. Because when you have options in mind and don’t know what design, content, and functionality will work well, use of A/B testing will help you see yourself what’s performing better. Make decisions backed up by results not just guided by the intuition that this might work well.

A/B testing is done for minor changes like changes in a call to action buttons, simple color changes, testing with different headlines but this is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s a way to determine what major changes impacts your customers’ behavior to the maximum and eases their buying procedure. To give you a better understanding of what this means and what can be done a few examples of what is preferably tested in the A/B testing and what your e-commerce testing checklist should basically include-

Headlines, sub-headlines.

Change call to action buttons or call to action text.

Images, details of the product.

Pricing structures.

Different layouts for the same product.

Small changes in the positioning of navigation items.

Different taxonomies for your site and many more.

Check what performs better and leads to better sales results. As earlier mentioned, it’s an ongoing process, you have to keep on doing this quite frequently. Based on the previous results you can keep on testing further. The cumulative impact of all these successive tests done will be evident in the long run.

Continuous testing and then taking appropriate actions based on the test results will lead to some very innovative changes and paves the way for earning your customer’s loyalty.

Keeping in mind what consumers want from your website is a better way to start. How’s that attainable? You will have to constantly build a hypothesis based on the consumers behavior and feedbacks, test for results, experiment more, and repeat the process.

A/B testing mostly resembles any scientific process and mostly it’s a step-by-step process. Let’s check how it should be performed-

Research on your website data to figure out the customer’s pain points. What’s driving them away from the conversion funnel. Google analytics tool will be helpful in recognizing the pages with highest bounce rates.

Customers’ on-page behavior can be understood with the help of a heat map, it’s an important behavior analysis tool. This might be helpful in gaining insight about what’s stopping your site visitors in getting converted.

Build a Hypothesis. Now to take a step further towards solving your customers’ problems, you have to build a hypothesis based on the insight gained by looking in the research done by various tools. After recognizing the problem, a solution must be offered that tackles the issue immediately and effectively.

A/B Test your page based on the hypothesis by making changes and test your variants to check whether it is able to resolve the issue or not.

Properly analyze your test results to understand which variant is most successful and leading towards the expected results.

If you are not able to gain insight and the test results are ambiguous. Go back to rebuilding a new hypothesis and follow the process of testing again. This should be repeated until a clear result is not obtained about what is working and leads towards the expected conversions.

Why is it important?

A/b testing is a great way to check what your customer wants to see? Thus, it is indeed very important. But what’s equally important to determine is its effectiveness. You are aiming for saving your customers time on your site and gain their loyalty by living up to their expectations.

It leads to a reduction in bounce rates. This one is obvious, tweaking small but necessary changes with A/B testing helps you establish the winning combinations that will make your visitors stay on your web pages for a longer duration.

A/B testing helps you get increased conversions. It’s the most effective way to understand what works and what doesn’t.

Easy analysis of what drives results is possible through following this procedure. You get real, factual results which are very easy to analyze.

A great deal of risk reduction is possible through it. You can rely on the results before making any big changes to your web pages.

Less cart abandonment is what most websites are aiming for from their customers. A/B testing helps with this. Cart abandonment happens in 40-75% of purchases. This is the biggest problem faced by e-commerce websites. Little changes made on where to display the shipping costs and easing out the checkout process, done by A/B testing can help in dealing with this prime issue.

Increase in sales. The sole reason A/B testing gains so much popularity is that you can see an increase in your sales. Lesser bounce rates, low cart abandonment and improved performance of your web pages will get you the desired results.

Better engagement with the website content. This is of primary importance, any visitor to your e-commerce website will only convert if they engage with the website content. Clear and simple content that saves your customer’s time and at the same time provide them with all the necessary product details to ease their decision making is very crucial and is attainable by testing the variants.

Conclusion:

Now that you are pretty much aware of the benefits that A/B testing is able to bring to your e-commerce business, you might need a little bit of professional help from the experts to successfully conduct the process of A/B testing for your business. You can choose to hire Magento 2 developers who can help you with all this process.